Social Media

> Viradsky

8 Powerful Social Media Marketing Tools for Savvy Businesses. Why You Should Not Kill Your Blog. Let’s be honest and cut to the chase – Social Media is not “free”.

If you disagree let me save you time and suggest you skip the remainder of this post. I’m about to discuss ways I believe Associations can invest their time for maximize value for their Members through blogs. A couple of weeks ago, I came across a post titled “Why are America’s fastest-growing companies killing their blogs?”. In his post (based on a study performed by the UMass Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research), author Mark Schaefer, insightfully identifies variations in the sampling and other factors from the report which results in the inability to draw a concrete conclusion that Fortune 500 companies are in fact, killing their blogs. This post bothered me. It bothered me because we are seeing many of our Association clients experience great benefits from Social Media, the most successful of these use a blog as the primary mechanism to “feed” their networks.

I studied the post some more. The problem The opportunity. Branding 2.0 for NGOs. ImageSparkImagetaggedquotinfographicquotSemblance_4dc0f44661d6b_w587. Planning an Effective Twitter Strategy. Social media news, strategy, tools, and techniques. 4 Ways to Measure Social Media Success With Free Tools. Eight Principles of Social Media ROI by Beth Kanter. Share | I was honored to be a part the WomenWhoTech online summit. I did a panel titled “Social Media ROI” with Lauren Vargas from Radian 6 and moderated by Roz Lemieux from Fission Strategy . Here’s the description: Do you know what kind of an impact social media is having on your brand, mission, or bottom line?

How do you put a monetary value on branding? Return on Investment The Return on Investment financial process was created by DuPont and used by Alfred Sloan to help make General Motors manageable in the 1920s.
Social Media ROI: The Metrics Muddle. For the last few years, the hottest debates in social media have centered around metrics, and how to prove the value of your activities.

Two years ago, we were debating whether or not we should even bother trying to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of our social media activities. Some people argued it was impossible, others that ROI wasn’t the point. We’ve come a long way in the last two years, and people like Katie Paine, Keith Burtis, Olivier Blanchard and Christopher S. Penn have shown us not only that we can measure the value of our social media activities, but how. Even so, as with many business buzzwords, there’s still some confusion about what we mean when we use the terms listening, monitoring, measurement, analytics and ROI.

(Two things: I’ve since added “listening” to the list of terms, so there’s a bonus for you, dear reader.

Blogging tools

But many feel that it is more of a “hype” and less of substance. In my opinion, Big Data Analytics is the real deal and if used correctly, can deliver great business results at a fraction of cost compared to other alternatives. As you can see on slide no. 27, the twitter sentiment scores obtained for many of the airlines are “comparable” to results of The American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). What is important to note here is that by analyzing few tweets using freely available R programming language (which is part of the GNU project), it is possible to achieve results similar to that of an elaborate and expensive market research study such as ACSI at a fraction of a cost, that too in real time.

Klout and PeerIndex Don’t Measure Influence. Brian Solis Explains What They Actually Do. Whether you like it not, Klout, Kred, PeerIndex, and Radian6 are measuring your social capital — not your influence but your potential for it.

Metcalfe’s Law and Social Media. Metcalfe’s Law Metcalf’s law in its simplest form assigns a value for a network.

The value increases proportionally depending on the number of nodes the network contains. For a network with 5 nodes, or computers such as a simple office intranet, the computed value would be 5² or 25. In its simplest form Metcalf’s law states that the value of a network doubles with each additional person on the network, thus networks tend to grow exponentially. In the original planning stages Metcalf’s law was based on the number of communication devices such as telephones, fax machines or computers, rather than the number of users on the system.

As technology progressed, the formula had to be tweaked somewhat so that it could be applied to users.
Facebook Innovation Briefing. InShare2121inShare Downloads Facebook Innovation Briefing (7.33 MB PDF) This 50+ slide presentation was delivered at an Econsultancy trends briefing during April 2011.

Inside, it explores Facebook and the associated innovation, trends, strategies and future possibilities to help understand and leverage this popular, but complex, platform through 2011 and beyond. With more than half a billion regular active users, Facebook is an area digital marketers shouldn’t be ignoring. This presentation explores how companies are currently being active within the social network giant and where things are heading in the future, giving you inspiration and preparation to successfully engage with users in new and exciting ways.

Packed with cutting edge examples, the presentation will challenge the way you approach your social media strategy and stimulate you to think laterally about your brand's presence in an ever-changing social environment. A few of the topics covered within the presentation include:
A Framework for Social Analytics. A framework for measuring social media activity. 50 Free Social Media Tools You Can't Live Without. A couple years ago, Jay Baer wrote a great blog post called ‘The 39 social media tools I’ll use today’ which was an all-in-one toolkit for social media marketers (and still is).

A lot has changed in the two years since that post was published so here is a ’2012 remix’ featuring 50 (mostly free) tools you can use on a daily basis. Whether you are just starting out in the social media arena or have been at it for a few years, this will hopefully be a handy resource. So, let’s serve ‘em up! Listening / Research The foundations for any social media marketing activity start with listening and in-depth research, ranging from influencer identification to campaign planning. General listening tools Best in class: SocialMention.com – As far as ‘free’ options go, this is a solid as it gets.Alternatives: BoardReader.com (discussion board specific), Addictomatic.com (a general listening dashboard) and PeopleBrowsr.com (big data, big insights).

Become a global media brand in 60 minutes. Social Business Intelligence: Positioning a Strategic Lens on Opportunity. Recently I’ve been tracking the growth of social analytics and the means of delivering well on it.

Connecting analytics to the needs of the business is the next step beyond basics of collating, aggregating, and identifying patterns in what the world is doing that affects your organization. On ZDNet recently, I explored the rapidly growing trend of big data. Collectively, big data represents a set of highly innovative new ways that companies are developing to distill value from the sheer scale, richness, and complexity of today’s vast networks of people and their data, of which the Internet is just the biggest example.
Pinterest / Home. Cool social business pictograms. Photos and videos directly from Celebrities and Influencers.